UPDATED: Roe v. Wade Overturned in Draft Opinion, According to Report
Tuesday, May 03, 2022
POLITICO is reporting Monday night that the Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by the news site.
"The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, Alito writes," according to the site.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes in the document, secured by POLITICO labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIf the decision reverts the decision-making to the states, the Court's decision would have little impact in Rhode Island as the legislature adopted legislation that affirms the rights under Roe.
The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.
POLITICO reports:
No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.
The draft opinion offers an extraordinary window into the justices’ deliberations in one of the most consequential cases before the court in the last five decades. Some court-watchers predicted that the conservative majority would slice away at abortion rights without flatly overturning a 49-year-old precedent. The draft shows that the court is looking to reject Roe’s logic and legal protections.
Analysis
A New Yorker article published last week titled, "If Roe v. Wade Is Overturned, What’s Next? "wrote, "Overturning Roe would be the culmination of a half-century-long legal campaign singularly focussed on that outcome. And there are signs that, far from being an end in itself, it would launch even more ambitious agendas. In the Dobbs litigation, Mississippi denied that doing away with Roe would cast doubt on other precedents, set between 1965 and 2015, on which Roe rested or which relied on Roe. This series of decisions held that states cannot ban contraceptives, criminalize gay sex, or refuse to recognize same-sex marriage. The state told the Court that those cases are not like Dobbs, because “none of them involve the purposeful termination of a human life.” But all of them involve the question of whether states should be able to make laws that affect some of the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. In recent weeks, in anticipation of the Dobbs decision, various Republican senators have questioned Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a state ban on contraceptives; Obergefell v. Hodges, which required states to recognize same-sex marriage; and even Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated a state anti-miscegenation law. Overturning Roe would almost certainly fuel the broader fight to get fundamental moral issues out of the realm of federal constitutional rights and under the control of the states."
This story was first published: 5/2/22 8:46 PM Updated: 5/3/2022 5:11 AM
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